I would say that speculation itself could be nonsensical, but speculation by itself definitely is, and i would also substitute statement for truth claim. After all, saying "i think that water's cold" is speculation until you actually touch it but saying "i think that water's hard" is nonsense, no?

I'd agree speculation based on some plausible chain of reasoning isn't meaningless. I don't know enough about Wittgenstein to really delve into that.

PS: "whereof one cannot know thereof one must STFU noob" wasn't aimed at you, or anyone, just trying to paraphrase for modern times.

come on now, using occams razor the way you are would indicate to you that chicken soup on my stove is more likely a cosmic accident than it is made by a creator simply because it makes an extra assumption that a creator exists and further has some plan involving eating chicken soup.

People used to say that about the chicken. And then we discovered evolution, and organic chemistry*. This is commonly called an argument from ignorance but it's equally an argument from arrogance. It states that simply because we don't understand how something could have occurred naturally it must have had a creator but the assumption that all natural phenomena are pretty much already all understood, or even capable of being understood within current cultures of knowledge, is extremely arrogant and complacent, and manifestly incorrect. Throughout history we've been reliably ignorant about all kinds of natural phenomena. It wasn't just that we did not know: there was no possible way we could know, given the intellectual culture and technology of the time.

After thousands of years of civiisation, it should be obvious by now that learning requires patience, humility and relentless struggle to get at the truth. One of the great evils about religion is that it instead embeds arrogance and complacency about knowledge and learning into our culture.

But OK, we're not talking about chickens. Or chicken soup. We're talking about the Universe. 42. The big bang. The giant cosmic fart of space-time. The trouble with "God did it!" is that it's just another accident waiting to happen for religion, like every other time they try to comment on the physical world. You can only get away with that for so long. Eventually our understanding catches up forcing them into an ignominious retreat. In the face of muscular, modern science, "god of the gaps" arguments are just about the most hare-brained PR disaster you could imagine. Religion lost its fight with Darwin, for example, and hurt itself badly in the process.

As for Occam's razor, however unimaginably complex and impossible it may seem that the universe could occur naturally, a creator capable of bringing this unimaginably complex phenomenon into being must be even more unimaginably complex and impossible. This gets you precisely nowhere. All you have done is replace one difficult question with an even harder one: who created god? By posing this question we haven't increased our level of understanding, we've increased our level of ignorance. That's a "code smell" if ever there was one.

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*Note that Darwin himself did not speculate about the origin of life, just the origins of species. However, Darwin's theory took us all the way back to the first, self-replicating organic molecules. Coming from the other direction, we know that complex organic compounds - such as alcohol, amino acids, etc - are naturally-occurring and fairly common in the universe (if anything can be called "common" in this vast desert of largely empty space). The gap between the two is not great and not difficult to fill. We certainly do not need to invoke a creator.

It's not about "feeling cozy"; it's about interacting effectively with reality. How can you interact effectively with reality if your understanding of it is woefully limited or distorted?

Besides, you probably believe lots of made up stuff, such as the universe being a certain size, that there was "nothing" before the big bang, that there is something called "dark matter" or "superstrings, or that a bear both shots and does not shit in the woods until someone observes it.

None of the above.

How can you interact effectively with reality if, instead of evaluating reality according to what you can understand, you make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so? If i had an explanation, i would make sure to at least have a sound argument for it. At the very least, i would give the reason(s) i have for believing it when someone asks me.

We make stuff up, and to believe it to the extent it is likely to be true. It's rational, and the scientific method is in fact an extension of this same logical process. The only difference between a person's belief in the big bang and that person's belief in, say, superstrings, black energy, some n-dimensional context on the big-bang, the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence, or the influence of some extra-terrestrial intelligence on our universe is the extent to which one believes it to be true.

People may be irrational by assigning artificially high probabilities to such beliefs, but logically there is no difference between a person who has more than the appropriate level of confidence in the existence space aliens and a person who more than the appropriate level of confidence in m-brane theory or the big bang (and before you knee-jerk, this statement does not imply that the appropriate level of confidence for each of these is the same).

You are using black-and-white thinking, and you are artificially constraining "what makes sense" to "that which is within the bounds of the scientific method". You probably do this because you have been programmed to knee-jerk with this argument to that which appears to be religious or spiritual, but if were valid thinking and you really believed it and lived by it, you wouldn't even be able to get out of bed in the morning or function in day-to-day existence. The intelligentsia of our society are, perhaps admirably, trying to steer it toward secularism, and use such simplified, propagandistic arguments to train the ignorant masses to reject religion; but, if you are actually intellectual, you should be above actually believing such crap yourself. Our actual reality is probably even stranger than the idea of a magic space daddy up there running things; it's probably beyond what we can imagine._________________Deja Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before

Guys who discovered DNA structure took LSD trips. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did the same. Not saying that if you take hallucinogens you will invent something, but it does remove barriers and cultural programming.

Guys who discovered DNA structure took LSD trips. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did the same. Not saying that if you take hallucinogens you will invent something, but it does remove barriers and cultural programming.

Teh Spiritual Nonscents! _________________Deja Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before

It's not about "feeling cozy"; it's about interacting effectively with reality. How can you interact effectively with reality if your understanding of it is woefully limited or distorted?

Besides, you probably believe lots of made up stuff, such as the universe being a certain size, that there was "nothing" before the big bang, that there is something called "dark matter" or "superstrings, or that a bear both shots and does not shit in the woods until someone observes it.

None of the above.

How can you interact effectively with reality if, instead of evaluating reality according to what you can understand, you make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so? If i had an explanation, i would make sure to at least have a sound argument for it. At the very least, i would give the reason(s) i have for believing it when someone asks me.

We make stuff up, and to believe it to the extent it is likely to be true. It's rational, and the scientific method is in fact an extension of this same logical process. The only difference between a person's belief in the big bang and that person's belief in, say, superstrings, black energy, some n-dimensional context on the big-bang, the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence, or the influence of some extra-terrestrial intelligence on our universe is the extent to which one believes it to be true.

People may be irrational by assigning artificially high probabilities to such beliefs, but logically there is no difference between a person who has more than the appropriate level of confidence in the existence space aliens and a person who more than the appropriate level of confidence in m-brane theory or the big bang (and before you knee-jerk, this statement does not imply that the appropriate level of confidence for each of these is the same).

You are using black-and-white thinking, and you are artificially constraining "what makes sense" to "that which is within the bounds of the scientific method". You probably do this because you have been programmed to knee-jerk with this argument to that which appears to be religious or spiritual, but if were valid thinking and you really believed it and lived by it, you wouldn't even be able to get out of bed in the morning or function in day-to-day existence. The intelligentsia of our society are, perhaps admirably, trying to steer it toward secularism, and use such simplified, propagandistic arguments to train the ignorant masses to reject religion; but, if you are actually intellectual, you should be above actually believing such crap yourself. Our actual reality is probably even stranger than the idea of a magic space daddy up there running things; it's probably beyond what we can imagine.

Whenever you decide to not stop reading this: "make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so" after "make stuff up" you will get the point. The nanosecond you stop talking about knee-jerking, propaganda programming and/or intelligentsia you will see that i don't have a problem with hypothesizing or speculating, even if it is really fantastical stuff, as long you're honest enough to accept it is unreasonable to cling on to a hypothesis when there's no rational argument or evidence to support it.

If you read what you post, you would notice the contradiction that arises from you saying you're an atheist (which means you don't believe any gods exists) and talking about "The intelligentsia of our society are, perhaps admirably, trying to steer it toward secularism, and use such simplified, propagandistic arguments to train the ignorant masses to reject religion". So, since religion without god is just a social club, either you're either a really persistent troll or you have some sort of cognitive dissonance you should have a think about.

Whenever you decide to not stop reading this: "make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so" after "make stuff up" you will get the point. The nanosecond you stop talking about knee-jerking, propaganda programming and/or intelligentsia you will see that i don't have a problem with hypothesizing or speculating, even if it is really fantastical stuff, as long you're honest enough to accept it is unreasonable to cling on to a hypothesis when there's no rational argument or evidence to support it.

If you read what you post, you would notice the contradiction that arises from you saying you're an atheist (which means you don't believe any gods exists) and talking about "The intelligentsia of our society are, perhaps admirably, trying to steer it toward secularism, and use such simplified, propagandistic arguments to train the ignorant masses to reject religion". So, since religion without god is just a social club, either you're either a really persistent troll or you have some sort of cognitive dissonance you should have a think about.

What you seem to be unable to comprehend is the fact that while we cannot know what happened before the event commonly refered to as "Big Bang", to take a position that there is NO sentience behind it is a leap of faith.

Whenever you decide to not stop reading this: "make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so" after "make stuff up" you will get the point.

You're the one being obtuse and failing to absorb what others are saying. But, I'm not responsible for your misapprehension of reality, so I'm not going to waste any more time trying to explain it to you. I suggest you go back and re-read the whole thread with an open mind._________________Deja Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before

Whenever you decide to not stop reading this: "make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so" after "make stuff up" you will get the point. The nanosecond you stop talking about knee-jerking, propaganda programming and/or intelligentsia you will see that i don't have a problem with hypothesizing or speculating, even if it is really fantastical stuff, as long you're honest enough to accept it is unreasonable to cling on to a hypothesis when there's no rational argument or evidence to support it.

If you read what you post, you would notice the contradiction that arises from you saying you're an atheist (which means you don't believe any gods exists) and talking about "The intelligentsia of our society are, perhaps admirably, trying to steer it toward secularism, and use such simplified, propagandistic arguments to train the ignorant masses to reject religion". So, since religion without god is just a social club, either you're either a really persistent troll or you have some sort of cognitive dissonance you should have a think about.

What you seem to be unable to comprehend is the fact that while we cannot know what happened before the event commonly refered to as "Big Bang", to take a position that there is NO sentience behind it is a leap of faith.

Cognitive dissonance much?

To take a position that there IS is another leap of faith, so the default position until we have a good reason to change our minds is I DON'T KNOW.

Whenever you decide to not stop reading this: "make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so" after "make stuff up" you will get the point. The nanosecond you stop talking about knee-jerking, propaganda programming and/or intelligentsia you will see that i don't have a problem with hypothesizing or speculating, even if it is really fantastical stuff, as long you're honest enough to accept it is unreasonable to cling on to a hypothesis when there's no rational argument or evidence to support it.

If you read what you post, you would notice the contradiction that arises from you saying you're an atheist (which means you don't believe any gods exists) and talking about "The intelligentsia of our society are, perhaps admirably, trying to steer it toward secularism, and use such simplified, propagandistic arguments to train the ignorant masses to reject religion". So, since religion without god is just a social club, either you're either a really persistent troll or you have some sort of cognitive dissonance you should have a think about.

What you seem to be unable to comprehend is the fact that while we cannot know what happened before the event commonly refered to as "Big Bang", to take a position that there is NO sentience behind it is a leap of faith.

Cognitive dissonance much?

To take a position that there IS is another leap of faith, so the default position until we have a good reason to change our minds is I DON'T KNOW.

Nobody is taking position that there IS, it is just your own projection, but you cannot grasp this since your ego is in the way. All people are saying is that "we cannot know for sure" which is consistent with current scientific method of declaring insights with a probability number. There is no such thing to KNOW.

BTW in case you haven't noticed, you are backpeddaling. In the course of this thread you went from the position of full on atheist with fervor of a zealot, to an agnostic. Congratulations.

Whenever you decide to not stop reading this: "make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so" after "make stuff up" you will get the point.

You're the one being obtuse and failing to absorb what others are saying. But, I'm not responsible for your misapprehension of reality, so I'm not going to waste any more time trying to explain it to you. I suggest you go back and re-read the whole thread with an open mind.

You obviously don't get that i won't absorb anything until there's evidence or some good reason to support its validity. I have asked you to explain what do you mean by "spiritual", how do you know it's real and what good reason there is for others to believe as you do, but you have failed to do so. So, there really is no use in this conversation if one of us wants the others to absorb what is being said without having a good reason to do so.

You want to call it speculation or hypothesis? fine with me, but don't expect me to accept what you're saying without providing anything more than your word to support it.

What you seem to be unable to comprehend is the fact that while we cannot know what happened before the event commonly refered to as "Big Bang", to take a position that there is NO sentience behind it is a leap of faith.

Every time someone tries to invoke a god to explain some phenomena they don't understand they turn out to be wrong. Sun god? Noop. Just a giant nuclear explosion held in check by its own force of gravity. Life on earth? Noop. Life will happily begin and then evolve all on its own.

Why would the big bang be any different? Divine invention has been discredited plenty times already. We don't need to keep doing that every time deists shift their position to another one of the gaps in our knowledge, thinking that we can't touch them there.

It's kind of sad, and thoroughly disreputable, like Romney trying to hide his tax returns. If the only place your beliefs stand up is in a knowledge-free zone where any old crap is just as valid as reputable theory, that says something pretty damning about those beliefs and their adherents.

Whenever you decide to not stop reading this: "make stuff up and believe it without a valid reason to do so" after "make stuff up" you will get the point. The nanosecond you stop talking about knee-jerking, propaganda programming and/or intelligentsia you will see that i don't have a problem with hypothesizing or speculating, even if it is really fantastical stuff, as long you're honest enough to accept it is unreasonable to cling on to a hypothesis when there's no rational argument or evidence to support it.

If you read what you post, you would notice the contradiction that arises from you saying you're an atheist (which means you don't believe any gods exists) and talking about "The intelligentsia of our society are, perhaps admirably, trying to steer it toward secularism, and use such simplified, propagandistic arguments to train the ignorant masses to reject religion". So, since religion without god is just a social club, either you're either a really persistent troll or you have some sort of cognitive dissonance you should have a think about.

What you seem to be unable to comprehend is the fact that while we cannot know what happened before the event commonly refered to as "Big Bang", to take a position that there is NO sentience behind it is a leap of faith.

Cognitive dissonance much?

To take a position that there IS is another leap of faith, so the default position until we have a good reason to change our minds is I DON'T KNOW.

Nobody is taking position that there IS, it is just your own projection, but you cannot grasp this since your ego is in the way. All people are saying is that "we cannot know for sure" which is consistent with current scientific method of declaring insights with a probability number. There is no such thing to KNOW.

BTW in case you haven't noticed, you are backpeddaling. In the course of this thread you went from the position of full on atheist with fervor of a zealot, to an agnostic. Congratulations.

Good job on that 1-dimensional thinking...

On the subject of "what happened before the big bang?", i do say that i don't know. The atheist position is the rejection of belief in deities, which hasn't been discussed here, since most of us discussing this are, apparently, atheists.

Also, go reread bogamol's post about actually believing in a prime mover to see someone taking the position that there IS.

What you seem to be unable to comprehend is the fact that while we cannot know what happened before the event commonly refered to as "Big Bang", to take a position that there is NO sentience behind it is a leap of faith.

Every time someone tries to invoke a god to explain some phenomena they don't understand they turn out to be wrong. Sun god? Noop. Just a giant nuclear explosion held in check by its own force of gravity. Life on earth? Noop. Life will happily begin and then evolve all on its own.

Why would the big bang be any different? Divine invention has been discredited plenty times already. We don't need to keep doing that every time deists shift their position to another one of the gaps in our knowledge, thinking that we can't touch them there.

I agree with most of what you're saying here, but suggest you try to see the issue in the context of the dissolution of organized religion, to be replaced by secular philosophy and metaphysics. For a growing number of people, including many scientists and highly educated, intellectually respected people, what you call "belief in God" is no longer absolute, blind faith in the existence of some bearded man in the clouds; it's a recognition of the somewhat likely or unlikely existence of "a higher power" or other influential intelligence playing or having played some role. I'm not arguing this to be the case; I'm arguing that bigotry against such thinking is not rational, scientific, tolerant, or dignified.

I don't mean any personal offense by this, because I see it all the time, but I think many of us are blinded by having been programmed to reject and denigrate "religion", and this inhibits our own ability to grow and logically and rationally consider the nature of our reality on a truly intellectual level. Rational thinking is not characterized by unsupported truisms or black-and-white absolutes -- those are the very things you are criticizing.

The guy referred to in the OP is either a fanatical fundamentalist or a blustering liar, but that doesn't make everybody who thinks there may be some "higher power" or "intelligence" at work in the cosmos/multiverse/all-that-is similarly worthy of ridicule. Even if you reject such ideas, it may just be that's because you're not as intelligent, educated, or wise as they. And, unless you want people to think you're a simple-minded bigot, you'll adopt terminology that avoids lumping them together in one pigeon-hole to be shat upon._________________Deja Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before

Last edited by Bones McCracker on Sun Oct 07, 2012 9:03 pm; edited 1 time in total

What you seem to be unable to comprehend is the fact that while we cannot know what happened before the event commonly refered to as "Big Bang", to take a position that there is NO sentience behind it is a leap of faith.

Every time someone tries to invoke a god to explain some phenomena they don't understand they turn out to be wrong. Sun god? Noop. Just a giant nuclear explosion held in check by its own force of gravity. Life on earth? Noop. Life will happily begin and then evolve all on its own.

Why would the big bang be any different? Divine invention has been discredited plenty times already. We don't need to keep doing that every time deists shift their position to another one of the gaps in our knowledge, thinking that we can't touch them there.

It's kind of sad, and thoroughly disreputable, like Romney trying to hide his tax returns. If the only place your beliefs stand up is in a knowledge-free zone where any old crap is just as valid as reputable theory, that says something pretty damning about those beliefs and their adherents.

Just because you don't understand what I am saying doesn't make my point theistic. Your defensive position comes from black-white, either-or paradigm which you are stuck in. Have fun in 19th century.

It kinda make sense, to go back to the original political ambition of this thread, why 19th century cartesianists who think themselves "on the edge", even tho their modus operandi is over a century old vote for Democrats

You are simply easy to manipulate by the people whose version of operating system has a higher major number.

What reason do you have to believe there is a prime mover in the first place?

What is your explanation? Two branes colliding? The question of what initiated the big bang is essentially a metaphysical question... not a question of physics, unless one ventures into territory like M theory.

The real bottom line is clear. Belief in what initiated the big bang is just that, belief.

I don't have an explanation, but i'm not gonna make up one just so i can feel cozy.

What is your reason for believing there is/was a prime mover?

I don't. I'm agnostic on the issue. But I do admit that prime mover wins the William of Ockham's razor test vs "random chance".

I am not theistic, but I am not so intellectually dishonest to the point of saying that I know they are wrong about the origin of the big bang.

I don't know they are wrong. I do know they have no evidence to support their claims, and they sure as hell don't know they are right. So living your life like it were true (to such an extreme extent in some cases) isn't very logical. keep in mind that some people KILL because their prime mover can beat up your prime mover.

Just because you don't understand what I am saying doesn't make my point theistic.

Bu your point is theistic, even if you don't appear understand that. Only religion has the audacity to claim that some kind of supreme being created things. That is a religious argument.

They only get away with it by hiding in the dark. Every time we shine a light, eg on the origins of species, supreme-being-ists run away and find another dark corner to hide in. We've chased them across all of time and space, all the way back to the big bang and yet they're still up to their old tricks, hiding in the dark and claiming their ideas are just as valid as anyone else's. In due course, they'll be hounded out of this latest dark corner of ignorance as our increasing knowledge shines a light into that. We've already seen hints of multiverse bubbles colliding with our own universe, for example.

We simply do not have to deal with this any more. It's not just that their ideas are not rational, they can never be rational. Hiding in the dark and running away each time you are caught isn't even honest. You can discuss religion as moral philosophy if you like but you categorically may not discuss religious belief as a viable explanation of creation.

Just because you don't understand what I am saying doesn't make my point theistic.

Bu your point is theistic, even if you don't appear understand that. Only religion has the audacity to claim that some kind of supreme being created things. That is a religious argument.

I don't CLAIM THAT you projectivistic simpleton, I claim agnostic point of view where we cannot KNOW with 100% certainty in sceintific context, because you have to MEASURE and EVALUATE with probability number.

You just wan't to be right, because the thread started as political provocation, and you cannot handle the heat.

How hard it is for you to understand that we cannot ever make assumptions of what happened beyond singularity point, if that "beyond" even exist in metaphysical sense?

If you agnostically say god is possible, you are saying that this is as reasonable as any other speculation. Quite clearly it isn't. It's not rational and can never be rational.

The loose terminology, strawmen and generalities of your statement are characteristic of brainwashed, simple-minded bigots. You have no idea what is "possible" and what "reasonable speculation" might be in many domains, such I have mentioned (e.g., other dimensions of reality, the context of the big bang, causality of theoretical absolutely initial conditions, etc.). One thing we know for sure is that we know very little about reality (we don't even know why things have mass, how many dimensions of reality there are, or what the universe even is), yet you have the unmitigated hubris, like some kind of ignorant, primitive witch doctor shaking his rattle at people, to pontificate about what is and is not possible or reasonable. It's like listening to a 1st grader come home and tell daddy that he's dumb because he doesn't know "there's seven colors". (And then after having it explained to him several times, keep walking around telling everybody who will listen that they're dumb too, because they don't know "there's seven colors")._________________Deja Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before

Name one physical phenomenon which has been successfully explained by religion, not science.

The linearity of Time. The apparent long-term movements of the sun, moon, and stars were first observed, studied, and documented, and forecast by by ancient priests, druids, and astrologers. Archaeologists tell us that, prior to that, primitive man's concept of time was a short, ever-repeating cycle.

However, your question is without significance because you artificially limit it to "religion", "physical phenomena", and the perhaps most importantly, the past. You're being that dude I talked about who says, "What's over the horizon? We don't talk about that because that's not science." Unlike you, real scientists speculate all the time and understand it to be quite rational, if not within the domain of the scientific method.

Now, name one truly important question or discovery (e.g., "what's the difference between right and wrong", "how should men behave toward each other and other creatures", "why are we here"), ever answered by thinking limited entirely to the scientific method. Anything you can think of that's on that level of importance is fine. Valid non-scientific thinking is also rational and of at least equal importance._________________Deja Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before